SEO specialists are dead

Google is drowning in crap. What frustrates me is that they have the data through Analytics to figure out what sites people actually find useful, and yet refuse to use that data out of fear of alienating advertisers. I think the company should be less focused on opening up new ways for spammers to game them (+1) and more focused on figuring out ways to efficiently regress SERP position on site traffic in order to come to a better understanding of which results people actually use.

That said, I'm really sorry to hear you lost your job. I'm in the education industry and imagine margins have to be paper thin for a teaching directory even done right. So maybe it is a good thing to move on and find other opportunities. Leaving on good terms is important, and it's classy of you to still promote the company in your blog.

I d say the difference is between manipulation and marketing. You can still rank high, but now you just need a really good product that organically earns place in high-trafficked channels. Now, I you want to do SEO, you need a much better understanding of marketing and probably a Loy more money. Thoughts?

I'd say that the link "builder" is dead. "Earning" links however, could be a different story. If content gets a lot of tweets, fb shares etc and non-manipulative links (not just 100 links with the same anchor text), then Google should still reward the site that earns those links. That was the direction that I was trying to go after the 24th. That said, it was more difficult to do that for a directory site, which is what TeachStreet was.

I would have never posted this on HN myself because I'm not a frequent user. I really have to thank Kirill for posting this. I've already gotten emails from three CEOs :D. HN is amazing!

I think a more apt title is that content farms are dead.